


How Cruel

by clare_dragonfly



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:16:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clare_dragonfly/pseuds/clare_dragonfly





	How Cruel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lonelywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/gifts).



Malcolm opened his eyes and saw her.

Just a child. But old beyond her years. How long had she been watching? Had she come into the maze knowing what she was looking for?

He looked away, fearing that he held her there with his gaze. If she could go now and forget this, it would be the better for her.

But when he looked back, she was still there. She had not moved. She watched.

—

He meets her at the gate.

He knew she would return. He knows her as well as he knows his own children—better, perhaps, for she is more like him. And he knows that she has not done this awful thing on purpose to destroy his family. He does not know what she thought her reasons to be, but he knows it is not her fault.

He never spoke to her of what she saw that night after his return from Africa, that night in the hedge maze.

She loves her mother. So she took her for a role model. She has no better one, after all.

“Vanessa,” he says.

“I have to see her,” she says, her face wild, her voice harsh with tears.

“What good would it do?” He tries to make his voice gentle, because he knows his fury is unfair and will not help. But her deeds shattered his daughter’s heart, tore his family. He cannot forget that.

And yet in her he still sees the child from the hedge maze, despite how well she has demonstrated now that she is a child no longer.

“I can explain,” she says. She makes a half-motion toward him, then looks away. “Make this right.”

“It cannot be made right,” he says, and he wonders whether he is speaking of Vanessa’s liaison with Captain Branson or his own entanglement with Claire. “Let it rest, Vanessa.”

“How can I let it rest when it has destroyed the only friendship, the only love, I have ever known?” This time she looks him boldly in the eye and steps forward, bringing her body close to his. He stands his ground, although inside he shrinks away.

“What is destroyed cannot be rebuilt,” he says. “Not in the same way. I know that too well myself.” There are things he has seen—but he does not need to speak of those.

His words come back to him, echo in his own ears, and a great wave of shame washes over him. The disasters he has seen—even wrought—in Africa? They are nothing to what he leaves at home. No wonder, no wonder, Vanessa does not know her way. Not when her way was shown to her by people such as him. Him and Claire.

Vanessa is his fault, the destruction of his family is his fault, and it can never be rebuilt.

“I’m sorry, Vanessa,” he says, and he is not ashamed to hear his voice shake.

“You’re _sorry_?” she hisses at him, bringing her face close to his. “And what are you sorry for, Sir Malcolm?”

She doesn’t give him a chance to respond. Instead she seizes his chin in her long, iron-hard fingers, pulls it down the few inches it takes to reach her face, and kisses him on the mouth.

Her lips are steel covered in velvet, catching at his lips like snares, heedless of the scratchy beard, refusing to let him go. Her tongue slides into his mouth, a serpent in the garden.

Is he too startled to tear himself away from her, or is it merely the strength of her grip, the strength of will possessed by Miss Vanessa Ives?

She lets him go, and he staggers backward, wincing at bruised-feeling lips.

Is this what she thinks of him?

“I’m sorry, Vanessa,” he says again, staring at her, uncertain that he is seeing her.

She gives a sob, one hand going to her dark mouth. Then she turns and runs from him, runs to the hedge maze, her dark hair streaming behind her like blood spreading into a muddy river.

—

When he finds her she is lying in the center of the hedge maze, eyes wide and white and staring to the sky, convulsing in a way he has never seen before.

—

Malcolm takes Vanessa back to her mother, back to her own bed, carrying her in his own arms. He does not speak to Claire until he has to; for Vanessa’s care he must cooperate with her. (Gordon Ives is a useless, prevaricating little man, and Malcolm’s eyes slide past him as they would a piece of furniture.) He makes it clear that what they had is nothing. It is over.

Mina and Gladys will not speak to him or to Claire. Peter, poor Peter, tries to be a go-between. But he fades. Malcolm has no attention to spare for him.

When the doctors throw their hands up at last, Claire wants to send Vanessa to an asylum in London. Malcolm travels there alone and investigates. He feigns an interest in the hospital; he represents himself as a wealthy, titled investor.

If what they show him is the best of what they do, the least inhumane, the most beneficial, then he never wants anyone with the name of Ives to even see the place.

Vanessa gets no better. In the midst of her convulsions, at times, she speaks in gibberish—or a language just at the edge of Malcolm’s understanding. When he asks Claire if she understood any of it, she looks at him in puzzlement and tells him that there were no words, only nonsense. But when he listens hard, his hands holding down her arms so she does not injure herself with her own hands, his ear as close to her lips as he dares, he senses meaning in it.

It reminds him of another language he heard once, long ago, in Egypt.

Mina travels to stay with a friend of hers, a Lucy Westenra (as far removed as she can get from Murrays and Iveses and Bransons), and Peter relates that she has met a new man there. Malcolm writes to her once a week. She never writes back.

He searches for a better hospital, one that will help Vanessa without destroying her. Then he searches for a reasonable asylum. Then he searches merely for a doctor, any one man who might have seen things that are different in the world, who might be willing to look at things sideways and inside-out the way Malcolm does. A man who might be able to accept that there is more in the world than what shows itself to eye or hand.

The man he finds is young, almost too young—but Malcolm remembers how young he was when he first went to Egypt, how young Vanessa is herself, and he knows there is no such thing as too young.

“I do not study the living,” Dr. Frankenstein tells him. “Not unless they are dying.”

“She will die if nothing is done for her,” says Malcolm harshly. “She is a mystery, Dr. Frankenstein. Her disease is a mystery. I have come to you because you seem to be the only doctor in England willing to work in mysteries.”

The doctor frowns at him. “My mysteries are of a special kind.”

“Miss Ives is very special.”

“Your daughter?”

Malcolm shakes his head once.

“I cannot leave my own work, Sir Malcolm.”

Malcolm nods. “Then I shall bring her to you.”

—

Claire doesn’t want Vanessa to leave the Ives estate, of course—not to see some strange foreign doctor with no reference among society—but Malcolm does not let her argue. At times, Vanessa is fit to travel, and when one of those times comes, he dresses her himself and puts her in his carriage. He takes her to London to meet Dr. Frankenstein.

She is bedraggled and ungracious, angry with Malcolm for taking her here—and for so many other things—and unwilling to cooperate with Dr. Frankenstein. The young man is fascinated at the description of her symptoms. “Has anyone considered galvanistic experiments?” he asks, not really asking, his voice quick as his eyes darting over Vanessa’s body. “The application of animal electricity has been quite fascinating in some cases.”

“I am not hysterical,” says Vanessa.

“Don’t they use that on corpses?” growls Malcolm.

“Yes,” says Dr. Frankenstein, “and I believe hysteria is merely a symptom, perhaps a symptom of the same malady that now has Miss Ives in its grip. If galvanic force is applied, I believe that her—“

“Doctor,” interrupts Vanessa, her voice icy, “do not speak of me as though I cannot hear you. I may be ill but I am still capable of hearing and thought.”

Dr. Frankenstein blinks once, twice, and then nods, his eyes at last looking at _Vanessa_ , and not at her illness. “Of course. I beg your pardon, Miss Ives. If you would consent to a few experiments? Very small applications of electricity, they should be painless, at least at first—for the purpose of diagnostics, you see. If that is successful, we will discuss how to move on next, whether stronger applications are worth the pain they will likely cause. I can of course supply you with medicine to help the pain.”

Vanessa’s lips part, then close again, and she shakes her head. There is utter silence before she says, “I do not know why you cannot all just leave me alone.”

Her eyes are wide, angry and cold, but Malcolm cannot help but still see the little girl who watched him in the hedge maze.

He says nothing. Guilt claws at his gut, and all his apologies will never suffice.

“Surely you do not wish to die?” the doctor asks.

Vanessa looks at him, heavy-lidded and silent.

Taken aback, Frankenstein tries to recover himself, his tongue tripping over his words for a moment. “That is—I mean to say—if you were to consent to these experiments, it is highly possible that whatever is learned in them could be used to help other people.”

After a moment Vanessa nods.

The doctor turns to Malcolm. “If these experiments are to prove useful, I must do at least one while she is lucid, and then more while the seizures take her. How often can we expect them?”

“At any time and no time,” says Malcolm. “Better to be prepared for anything. I have a house in London; there is plenty of room for both of you to stay.”

Vanessa says nothing. Dr. Frankenstein shakes his head. “I told you that I could not leave my own work. But I will visit several times a day. I have no need to keep ordinary sleeping hours.”

“I shall let it be known that you are permitted to enter at any time,” says Malcolm. “Shall we begin the first experiment?”

—

The second experiment with galvanism, when Vanessa is seizing, yields results that seem to fascinate and baffle Dr. Frankenstein. Malcolm has chosen his man well; the confusion only draws the doctor in closer. The third experiment is much the same. But on the fourth, everything changes.

Vanessa speaks to them in a voice that is not her own. She speaks of things she could not know—things no one living could know. Malcolm does not flinch at her accusations. He has done worse.

“He’ll die there, you know,” she says, and now the voice is her own but the words are meaningless. Her head lolls, her eyes boring into Malcolm’s. “He’ll die if you let him go.”

Dr. Frankenstein stops the experiment and Vanessa falls limp. He is shaken. “What was that?”

“A warning,” says Malcolm.

He thinks he knows what she means. But he also knows this: it is his fault that all of this has happened to her. And he is the only one who can make it right. And he will not let his son die. He will not let him go.

He leaves Vanessa in the care of the servants and the doctor. He returns home, to his echoing old house by the sea. He finds his son.

“Peter,” he says. “We’re going to Africa.”

In Egypt he will find answers. In Egypt he will find absolution. In Egypt he will find an end.


End file.
